RNC’s Steele blasts retiring Baird

The Republican Party is personalizing anger at Sunday’s House vote approving health care reform, with GOP National Chairman Michael Steele even delivering an attack on Washington’s retiring Democratic Rep. Brian Baird.

Angry words, exchanged after the Capitol Hill battle in Washington, D.C., indicate that the 2010 election race is already underway – its targets not limited to those who are running.

Baird, who has shown a sometimes-prickly independence in Congress, voted for health care reform. Last fall he opposed a more liberal House version of the legislation that included a government-run public option.

By voting “Yeah” on Sunday, Steele said in a statement, Baird “has stopped fighting for Washington State and will be forever remembered as the congressman who sold out his constituents in the ninth-inning for Team Obama.,”

The chairman’s words for Baird were sweet whispers compared to what Republicans were saying about Democrats who will still be on the ballot in November.

“Your support is critical to ending Pelosi’s reign as speaker,” Sessions wrote.

The NRCC has targeted Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Wash., with a daily dose of boilerplate attacks. At one point, its press releases claimed Larsen was trying to lock up energy resources, by dint of a U.S. Interior Department study of possible sites for new national monuments in the West.

The GOP’s latest missive accuses Larsen of being a “rubber stamp” who chose “to stand with President Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi” instead of his Northwest Washington constituents.

Democrats were cranking up propaganda of their own.

The target: Rep. Dave Reichert, R-Wash., the lone GOP congressman from Western Washington, who argued on the House floor that Congress should “start over” on health care.

“For decades, big health insurance companies have profited off discrimination and denials and pricing middle class families out of the care they need but that didn’t stop Rep. Dave Reichert from continuing to side with insurance companies,” said Jennifer Crider of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

“Reichert refused to give folks back home access to the same health care that he gets as a member of Congress.”